Don McCullin Quotes

Photography is a way of feeling, of touching, of loving.

I'm not a politician or a scholar or political historian. I'm just a photographer who's trying to capture a spirit. It's not an intellectual process; it's an intuitive process.

You see what you think, you see what you feel, you are what you see If with the camera you can make others see it - that is photography.

The only way an artist can communicate with the world at large is on the level of feeling.

Photography for me is not looking, it's feeling. If you can't feel what you're looking at, then you're never going to get others to feel anything when they look at your pictures.

I have a feeling that in art the need to understand and the need to communicate are one.

The most delightful aspect about the language of cinema is that it speaks to each of us in different ways - it is a purely subjective experience.

I never tried to revolutionise photography; I just do what I do and keep my fingers crossed that people will like it.

My memory of those places is better than my pictures. That's why I get much more satisfaction out of shooting thematic work that has to do with an idea that I'm searching for, or searching to express.

I do not have much patience with a thing of beauty that must be explained to be understood. If it does need additional interpretation by someone other than the creator, then I question whether it has fulfilled its purpose.

Photography is a way of feeling, of touching, of loving. What you have caught on film is captured forever... it remembers little things, long after you have forgotten everything.

Whether he is an artist or not, the photographer is a joyous sensualist, for the simple reason that the eye traffics in feelings, not in thoughts.

I'm really taken by the fact that my photographs live on somebody's wall.

I have more of a relationship with the subject than I do with my camera equipment. To me, camera equipment is like a tin of shoe polish and a brush - I use that as a tool, but my basic camera is my emotion and my eyes. It's not anything to do with the wonderful cameras I use.

'Phase' is a special song to me, and I wanted the video to make you feel like you are on a journey with me. My team and I shot this video three different times, and every time I got it back, I wanted to go a step further.

To take photographs is putting one's head, one's eye, and one's heart on the same axis

I believe that the medium of photography prevails entirely as an act of faith in the souls of those who love and practice it. And so every photograph becomes another subtle variation on the theme of the medium itself.

The challenge for me has first been to see things as they are, whether a portrait, a city street, or a bouncing ball. In a word, I have tried to be objective. What I mean by objectivity is not the objectivity of a machine, but of a sensible human being with the mystery of personal selection at the heart of it. The second challenge has been to impose order onto the things seen and to supply the visual context and the intellectual framework - that to me is the art of photography.

We do not make photographs with our cameras. We make them with our minds, with our hearts, with our ideas.

Art must take reality by surprise. It takes those moments which are for us merely a moment, plus a moment, plus another moment, and arbitrarily transforms them into a special series of moments held together by a major emotion.

The desire to discover, the desire to move, to capture the flavor, three concepts that describe the art of photography.

Seeing is not enough; you have to feel what you photograph

A lot of photographers think that if they buy a better camera they'll be able to take better photographs. A better camera won't do a thing for you if you don't have anything in your head or in your heart.

Photography... is either an expression of a cosmic vision, an embodiment of a life movement or it is nothing - to me. (1919)

Photography is an adventure just as life is an adventure. If man wishes to express himself photographically, he must understand, surely to a certain extent, his relationship to life.